Get the TV guru's secrets for a healthy, balanced life

Dr. Oz Is Listening

Dr. Oz Is Listening

Growing up in Wilmington, DE, as the child of immigrants from Turkey, Mehmet Oz wasn't the most likely to succeed—or even the most popular kid in class. "Every day in elementary school, I would get off the bus and kids would pick on me. I was in so many fights, I thought the principal's office was a classroom," he says. "I thought I had to prove something because I came into an environment as an outsider."

This experience gave Dr. Oz his unmistakable ability to empathize. "When you've been an outsider, you never forget what it feels like. It's an instant and lifelong way to connect with people, especially when they're feeling different," he explains. "If I can connect with you in a way that makes you realize I care about you, I can inspire you to change."

Even so, it took hard work for the 51-year-old father of four to combine his brain smarts with, well, his heart smarts. "When I started doing TV, I was a terrible communicator. I'd talk to women who had bad things happen in their lives, and I'd just jump in with answers instead of fully listening to them first," he says. "In many ways, it was about working through a lesson my wife, Lisa, has been trying to teach me throughout our marriage: You don't fix a feeling, you hear a feeling."

Read on to learn how Dr. Oz has learned to balance his own life so he can help others balance theirs.

Focus on one task at a time.

Focus on one task at a time.

When I'm performing a surgery, I have to direct all my attention to the job at hand. I can't possibly do an operation and be thinking about the show or even my next task in the ICU. Research now shows that our brains actually can't multitask, and that when we think we are, what's really happening is that our attention keeps switching from one thing to the other and we end up doing both tasks poorly.

TRY IT: Simply put, prioritize your tasks and don't tackle another until you finish the first one.